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Sample Sources

The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
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Pavel’s Letters

Something is wrong between me and the story I want to write. Whatever subject I touch on, after five or four, sometimes even two pages, either the story throws me out or I throw myself out. As if I…

Cuckoo

So, like I said before, the only problem of Pnina was, she couldn’t have children. Everything else, a husband, money, work, vacations, she had. Only no children. Not that she and Yochanan didn’t try…

The Converts

On the holiest day we fast till sundown. I watch the sun stand still as the horizon edges towards it. Four hours to go. The rabbi’s mouth opens and closes and opens. I think: fish and little steaming…
Stone cube inscribed with cuneiform.
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Lot (puru), Assyria

Lot (puru), Assyria, 8th century BCE. The inscription identifies this as a lot (puru—the Akkadian form of Hebrew pur, the word used in Esther 3:7) that belonged to an Assyrian official named Yahalu…

Smoke

Can you imagine the air filled with smoke? It was. The city was vanishing before noon or was it earlier than that? I can’t say because the light came from nowhere and went nowhere. This was years…
Armed chair decorated with ivory inlay including elaborate carving on arms.
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Ivory-inlaid Chair

Ivory-inlaid chair, Salamis, Cyprus, 8th or 7th century BCE. Among the most beautiful items surviving from Israel and neighboring countries are the ivory carvings used for decorating furniture, among…

Fierce Attachments

My mother and I are out walking. I ask if she remembers the women in that building in the Bronx. “Of course,” she replies. I tell her I’ve always thought sexual rage was what made them so crazy.…
Wall relief showing six men dressed in tunics, one prostrate and two kneeling, with two bearded soldiers behind them.
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Men Doing Obeisance to Sennacherib

The six men from Lachish in this section of Sennacherib's palace relief are dressed quite differently from the men shown in other sections. They are clad in the simplest of short-sleeved, unbelted…

On Filling Shoes

I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday. During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I…